Suffolk County Is Searching For Two Eagle Killers

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service has reported that a bald eagle was shot and killed by two men with a shotgun near Water Mill in Suffolk County on Dec. 1 3, for reasons only the men know. Bald eagles are increasingly rare in the nation that adopted them as the national symbol, and rewards of $3,000 are being offered for information leading to the conviction of the bird's killers.

The bald eagle is migratory in the New York area. Birds that nest in Canada spend the winter along the east coast of the United States, from New York southward. They nest high in trees near water, and feed chiefly on fish, though they occasionally eat a small mammal.

The eagle'ss diet is responsible for its rarity in two ways. As favorable habitats, such as estuaries and salt marshes, are destroyed by human development, they can support fewer birds. Moreover, because the eagle is at the top of a food chain it receives concentrated doses of pesticides; its eggs’ shells are therefore abnormally thin and easily broken before the 35day incubation period has passed, and eagle births are few. At present there are thought to be

fewer than 100 bald eagles in the Northeastern United States and fewer than 1000 in the country as a whole, excluding Alaska, where rough estimates have run from as low as 5,000 to as high as 25,000.

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A version of this archives appears in print on January 2, 1977, on Page 115 of the New York edition with the headline: Suffolk County Is Searching For Two Eagle Killers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe